Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to generating production strategy plans and field development plans, assessing and ranking the potential of the different plans with a small number of parameters or initial conditions, thus considerably reducing the decision time for taking a particular strategy when compared with state of the art techniques.
Background Description
A typical state of the art hydrocarbon reservoir production strategy provides production decisions for a given planning horizon on a drilling schedule to maximize production. A typical planning horizon may locate production and injection wells. The drilling schedule may indicate which wells are to be drilled and when, and the production rate at which the wells are to operate. Varying the position, schedule and/or control of each wells may vary production to have a multimillion-dollar impact. Thus, evaluating reservoir production potential and economic performance over a wide range of alternative oil and gas production strategies is crucial. Also, because there are a large number of variables in selecting the strategy, it has been a time-consuming activity. Frequently, available information is limited, and based on uncertain reservoir geological and petro-physical properties. Typically, major investment decisions must be made on this limited information, especially when subterranean-flooding (e.g., with water) is the main production strategy.
Previously, experienced reservoir engineers heuristically defined and ranked complex production development plans, using trial-and-error to deal with problem components, separately and sequentially. After selecting drilling locations, for example, engineers heuristically defined a well drilling schedule. However, these ad hoc heuristic solutions, frequently have application only within the limited framework for which they were developed. Additionally, rather than arriving at the best overall or optimum realization, separately and sequentially dealing components may have discarded the most attractive or optimal solutions.
Thus, there is a need for dramatically reducing the number of drilling configurations that must be considered for a comprehensive reservoir production strategy and more particularly for rapidly generating and ranking several representative development plans under uncertainty to quickly converge on plans that jointly encompass all available production aspects.